Electronic system adopted by Winnipeg police to cut down on ticket fixing Rollout in works for some time; revealed weeks after guilty plea by officer who voided tickets for gifts By: Malak Abas Posted: 6:50 PM CST Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025

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The Winnipeg Police Service started rolling out an electronic ticketing system meant to improve accuracy and “enhance accountability” Wednesday, just weeks after a disgraced officer pleaded guilty to fixing traffic tickets in exchange for booze and gift cards.

Four vehicles equipped with scanners that pull information from a driver’s licence directly onto tickets — rather than having officers write tickets by hand — were on the road and issuing fines in a test run Wednesday, said Sgt. Ryan Berube with the traffic division.

“It’s leveraging technology with our current systems to, basically, automatically place (tickets) into our records management system,” Berube said.

“So it’s accessible, it’s more accountable, and it goes basically right to the courts and prosecutions without some of the errors that we maybe had in the past. All police vehicles on the road will have electronic ticketing tech installed over the next year.

“Tickets that are handwritten, that obviously takes some time, takes officers off the road for an extended period of time, kind of holds motorists up while they hand-write this ticket,” Berube said. “There could be various issues with it, some administrative errors or wrong dates, even legibility.”

He said the new system is more efficient and effective.

On Nov. 7, 48-year-old constable Elston Bostock, a 22-year veteran, pleaded guilty to a number of corruption offences, included fixing traffic tickets issued to friends voided in exchange for liquor and gift cards.

Three other officers stand accused of committing offences while partnered with Bostock.

Berube said the Bostock case isn’t a factor in the e-ticket rollout.

“That was a non-issue for us,” he said. “But a benefit of that e-ticket system… it’s no longer a handwritten ticket, it lives on our system. So there’s accountability in that, that that’s not going to go away.”

University of Manitoba law professor Brandon Trask said the timing of the initiative is key.

“I think it is not coincidental, in my view, that this is being rolled out shortly after the revelation about the officers… I think, certainly in relation to the guilty pleas that were entered for that one officer, constable Bostock, a lot of vulnerabilities with respect to the former system were exposed,” he said, adding the new system is a simple fix.

“A benefit of that e-ticket system… it’s no longer a handwritten ticket, it lives on our system. So there’s accountability in that.”

An RCMP spokesperson said its officers have used e-ticketing for more than a decade.

Trask called it concerning that city police didn’t adopt it sooner.

“This is just the WPS sort of catching up to the 21st century, from my perspective,” Trask said.

Former Crown prosecutor Zane Tessler, the retired director of the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba, said the issue of ticket fixing was more pervasive in the 1980s, but remains prevalent today.

“It’s not like what happened a few weeks ago was the very first time that the ticket system was being manipulated,” he said. “It was a lot worse decades ago. Unfortunately, it has continued in various ways since then.”

Tessler called the shift to electronic ticketing “long overdue.”

“We’ve seen, unfortunately, as recently as a few weeks ago, just how easy it is to skew the system and for someone to take advantage of the deficiencies in a very old and archaic way of processing violations,” he said.

A police insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he’s confident the new system will improve accountability and reduce abuse.

“It’s not like what happened a few weeks ago was the very first time that the ticket system was being manipulated.”

“I think it will be effective, definitely,” the source said, adding plans for a new ticketing system have been in the works for more than a decade.

While the police service did not tie its introduction of the new system to the Bostock scandal, “regardless, that becomes a reason for why it’s all that more important,” the source said.

What the new system won’t do, is eliminate the opportunity for some officers not to issue tickets in the first place, the source said.

“Any officer has discretion at the roadside” to issue a ticket or a warning, the source said.

It’s not uncommon at WiseUp Winnipeg, an advocacy group focused on traffic enforcement, to hear stories about people receiving tickets with basic errors, including misspelled names and other clerical mistakes, co-founder Todd Dube said.

“Those mistakes are such a waste of everybody’s time,” he said.

In 2022, a patrol sergeant was found not guilty of logging onto a police database to fix his own speeding ticket, despite what the presiding judge described as an “almost implausible” defence.

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Dube said cases such as that have eroded public trust in city police, and he’s hopeful the new system will help improve it.

“There are a lot of ‘eyes wide shut’ in the brass at the Winnipeg police,” he said. “I hope this would be the end of it.”

It’s not the first time Winnipeg police have considered fully electronic tickets; in 2014, a similar rollout was announced, but did not come to fruition.

— with files from Dean Pritchard

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.